The Southern Regional Council transitioned to operating with a board of directors

The Southern Regional Council transitioned from seeking a mass membership to operating as a board of directors, but its leaders still sought black participation. Johnson oversaw a project to reform freight rates in the South without relying on federal intervention. One of the SRC speakers happened to speak against seeking help from the Roosevelts just before learning that Franklin D. Roosevelt had died.

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with Guy B. Johnson, December 16, 1974. Interview B-0006. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Text of the Excerpt

And as time went on, it was
obvious that this sort of thing was actually a financial burden. That
if you promised them New South
plus the pamphlets, pretty soon you were going to be paying more in
printing and postage and so forth to service these people than you were
getting from them on the average. And so we began to recede from this
idea of a mass membership. And later on, as you may know, sometime up in
the years after I left there, they made this new policy official, that
there be no more members as such, and they went back precisely to the
thing that the old Commission had, namely that the Council is a big
board of directors. So, that little experiment in mass membership didn't
pan out at all.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Do you have an idea what the proportion of blacks and whites . . . black
and white response, was?
Dr. GUY B. JOHNSON:
No, I don't. Many of them would be people that some of us knew and we
could tell, but there were many just little ordinary people who just
wanted to pay their dollar and we had no way of knowing what their race
was. I suspect that the majority were white, because certainly the
mailing lists that we bought were much more likely to have white names on
them, I think. You know, people's names would be on the list in the
first place because they belonged to some organization or they subscribed
to some journal or something of that sort, and they were likely to be
white. Well, let's see, in '45, with the war closing, when we thought
that we could see the war winding down (it was
still pretty hot in the Pacific) . . . I organized a conference on the
post-war South. Now, you know the Southern Conference in its original
meeting had emphasized the South, Problem Number One. And I wanted this
conference to emphasize The South, Economic Opportunity Number One. So,
that was our subhead, you see, The Post-War South, Economic Opportunity
Number One. Well, the idea behind this was that this would be something
bigger than just race, I kept trying to get back to Odom's notion, you
know, that this Council ought to be something besides race relations.
And this turned out to be almost impossible. Sometimes I would propose
something to the executive committee and one of the black members would
say, "Well, that's not relevant enough to our
problems." And some of them felt this way about that
conference. And I had to argue with them and tell them that it would be
open to everybody, that we wanted black participation. So, they finally
authorized it. We got busy, we got some businessmen, lawyers, educators,
black and white, or at least we invited them. And we set it up at the
Biltmore Hotel. We had a morning session and an afternoon session. We
had some government people there. And we got an expert on freight rates.
This was one of our little non-racial ideas. You may not be aware of the
long standing freight rate situation, by which ever since the Civil War,
the Northeast has dominated this. And with Pittsburgh owning
the Birmingham steel works, if you were an Atlanta
contractor getting steel out of Birmingham, you paid precisely the same
amount as you would have from Pittsburg. Now, to some of us, this was
about as dirty as you could get. But all done under the authority of the
Federal government, the Interstate Commerce Commission and all that. And
we went in with some other organizations as parties to a law suit to try
to get a federal court ruling on this, and they turned us down. So, we
thought, "Well, we will try to make a little splash in this
conference." So we had this expert, a lawyer on freight rates,
to make one of the leading speeches. And he got a right good press on it
and I think that it had a little bit of effect later on in stirring up
the southern governors. This was really the key. So damn many of these
people were a part of this whole business structure, you know, that they
didn't much care for reform in freight rates. But finally, you got the
southern governors a little agitated about it, and then later, years
later, the Federal government did change these rates. They are much more
equitable today. Well, this was one of our little notions. And then we
had people talking about industry, post-war employment problems, I think
that someone talked about returning veterans and what have you. And we
had a young man down from Washington who had been a researcher for one
of the Congressional commissions, I think the
McCarran Commission. He had done a very good job, and he was very much
up on all kinds of economic, industrial conditions, trade, cotton
economy, and all sorts of things.

JACQUELYN HALL:

McCarran?
Dr. GUY B. JOHNSON:
I think that's what it was. Now, what this was about, I don't remember,
but they had a report that was considered very important. It probably
had something to do with trade and commerce. Well, I thought that it was
a very interesting program. But, it turned out that only a couple of
blacks came. Here we had hoped to get people like P.B. Young, Gordon
Hancock from Richmond, and all kinds of people to come. And whites came
from long distances, we had a good crowd. We had a Negro businessman
from Florida, he had a little part on the program and I guess that is
the reason that he came. And there were one or two others, and that was
all. But we had a good program and good press and then later, we put
together the main papers and got out our little publication called
The South, Economic Opportunity Number One. Oh, an
interesting thing happened. Right at the end of this meeting (this was
in April of 1945, April 12 or 11) . . . this young man from Washington
had been talking, he was the last speaker. And he did a very good job.
He was a Yankee, he was not a southerner. I had not known him before,
just a little contact after he had come to Atlanta. And he wound
up something like this . . . "Of course,
the problems in the South are, in the final analysis, going to have to
be solved by the people in the South. Don't put too much reliance on the
federal government or the New Deal or anything up there. They can do
something, but they are not going to solve these problems. Mr. and Mrs.
Roosevelt are not going to solve them. They are your friends, but they
can't solve them. You are not going to solve anything by going up to
Washington to have tea with Mrs. Roosevelt." Those were
practically his last words. And then I got up and thanked everybody and
adjourned the meeting. And we were going out into the lobby and someone
came running and said, "Mr. Roosevelt is dead."